


Into the Storm

by SectoBoss



Series: The SSSS/Pacific Rim Crossover [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-03-25 08:13:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3803176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another giant has emerged from a Silent Zone, and it’s up to the Nordic Defence Corps and their Jaeger to take it down. Easier said than done, especially when you’re in hurricane-force winds and your commanding officer is a madwoman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_“KDM Træleopard holding steady, altitude 500 metres. Shatterdome Bay 3 prepare for launch. Five minutes to neural handshake. Ten minutes to deployment. Jaeger: Viking Inferno, commence final checks. Engineering crew commence decoupling.”_ The voice of the Oresund Shatterdome’s AI rang out from its speakers, cold, clinical, uninterested. Emil heard it through the hard polymer-laminate of his drivesuit’s helmet and scowled, trying to quell the butterflies in his stomach. He winced slightly as the last connections between his suit and the interface arms were drilled together, yanking his shoulders back for a few seconds before the servomotors compensated.

He remembered when everyone had thought they’d won.

He didn’t remember much, of course. He had after all only been three years old when they’d dropped that bomb into the breach and sealed it off for good. One of his earliest memories was of him sat goggle-eyed in front of the TV in his uncle’s old house (one of the new holographic sets, his family had a lot of fancy gadgets when he was younger) watching the parade in Hong Kong as those pilots came back from the Challenger Deep. Uncomprehending – or perhaps not daring to believe, even at such a credulous age – he had turned to his Uncle Torbjorn and asked him what was going on. His uncle had just picked him up and hugged him, crying “It’s over, Emil! We won!”

Looking back, Emil thought, that should have been the moment when he learned never to trust that man. Two weeks later the first case of the Rash was reported in Sweden.

It had come through with one of the kaiju, or so the people on the TV had said while there was still TV being broadcast. One of the ones that had attacked Hong Kong must have infected half the city, and the next day when everyone had gone back to work, gotten on planes and ships to far-flung places... well, by the time anyone realised what was going on it was far too late. Like V-day, Emil didn’t really remember much of the Plague Year. Östersund was slap-bang in the middle of the Jämtland safezone, so the worst he ever had to put up with was the odd food shortage, week-long power blackouts and a few refugee families from Stockholm sharing their house. The Plague Year was always something that was happening ‘out there’. When news came through that the army had lost a battalion outside Uppsala, or that the Gotland safezone had collapsed, or from even further afield such as the nuclear strike on London or the evacuation of Italy, there had always been a sense that life for him would carry on much as it ever had in his four short years.

By the end of the Plague Year the world was unrecognisable. Three and a half billion were dead and vast swathes of the planet had gone dark – the Silent Zones that every child of the new world recognises from the classroom map of the world, huge black swathes scorched across the continents. But everyone thought the worst was over, right until the first reclamation divisions swept into the Silent Zones only to find that most of those three and a half billion hadn’t died at all. Every culture came up with a different name for the abominations they found in there – djinn, troll, ghoul, wendigo, corrupted – but what’s in a name? Call them what you like, the creatures of the Silent Zones would kill you all the same. Beasts and trolls could be matched, just, by the remnants of humanity’s armies. But they were just the start, the foreshocks of what really lurked in those forsaken places. Long-forgotten reports from the first days of the collapse, of the infected using the last of their strength to congregate in plazas and stadiums and any large open area, suddenly made sense. The smaller mutations were just a means to an end, convenient parcels to keep meat fresh in until they were needed for the true endgame of the Rash, the new kaiju: the giants. Horrid amalgams of meat and bone, hatching from the fused remains of thousands, they came screaming out of the Silent Zones, relentlessly following the reclamation trails up towards the last cowering enclaves of civilisation.

But humanity had just won the Kaiju War, and killing big things was becoming something of a specialty. The last of the Jaegers had fallen but their tech was still lying around. And at least they wouldn’t have to be built twenty-four stories tall any more – closer to sixteen, these days.

A knuckle rapped on the visor of Emil’s helmet. He blinked and refocused. Tuuri, doing final checks on his suit interfaces behind him, had leaned round and was smiling at him with barely-concealed mirth. “Good luck, Emil,” she said, muffled by the material of the helmet. “Oh, and... they suit you,” she added, nodding at the top of his head, “they really do. Goes with the theme, you know?”

Emil glared out at her and ground his teeth. He was ninety-nine percent sure that it was Tuuri who had super-glued a cat-ears headband to his drivesuit helmet, probably after their argument last night. However, a pilot doesn’t go making those kinds of accusations about their mechanic unless they want to wade into battle with a saucepan for a helmet and a dustbin lid for a shield.

“Theme? For the last time Tuuri, my – our – Jaeger does not have cat ears! Those are 5000-watt UV-halogen lamps! I shouldn’t have to explain this to the head of the engineering crew!” he growled.

“Lamps that happen to look like cat ears,” Tuuri replied, moving back behind him and fiddling with the interface some more. “I knew you’d come round to my way of seeing things after our little discussion last night.” She walked back into his field of view and flicked one of the ears, grinning just a little bit.

_“Neural handshake in one minute. Engineering crew complete pre-launch checkups. Six minutes to deployment. KDM Træleopard beginning descent to harnessing altitude. Jaeger pilots be advised: storm conditions prevalent, wind speed in excess of 70 kph. Exercise caution.”_

“Bring me back a souvenir!” Tuuri joked as Emil scowled at her some more. She clapped him on his armoured shoulder and gave him one last encouraging smile before disappearing behind him again. He felt the faint rattle-shudder of the conn-pod hatch being sealed shut behind him.

Emil sighed and shook his head. In six minutes he’d be marching into the closest to Hell he ever wanted to get, and was about to do so in a beaten-up Jaeger, with cat ears on his head and a madwoman directing the assault. _How did it come to this?_ he wondered to himself. Trying to resign himself to his fate, he glanced across the cramped conn-pod interior to the figure stood to his left, dressed in an identical drivesuit to his own and the picture of calm compared to Emil’s jittery nervousness.

At least he wouldn’t be going alone.

* * *

 

Lalli wondered how angry Emil would be when they drifted and he found out that the headband was his idea.

_“Neural handshake in thirty seconds.”  
_

If they made the computer speak Finnish he might be able to understand it, as it was he could just have heard a report that the level two toilets were broken for all he knew. They’d be deploying soon, he’d worked that much out. Where to, no-one had bothered to tell him. Why – apart from the obvious – was a similar mystery. He guessed everyone just figured they could tell Emil and it’d get relayed across to him when they drifted. If he was honest, Lalli was fine with that arrangement. It meant people bothered him less.

_“Twenty seconds.”  
_

Lalli still sometimes had trouble getting his head around the fact that the two of them were drift-compatible. Emil was noisy, messy, arrogant and full of barely-concealed insecurities – or, to translate that into Finnish, Swedish. Hardly the kind of person he’d choose to pilot with.

Their first meeting had not been auspicious. Lalli had filled out that daft online ‘drift assessment’ exam at Tuuri’s insistence – in fact, now he thought about it, she was probably hoping the pair of them were drift compatible and he’d be her ticket into a Jaeger conn-pod. He’d thought nothing of it until four weeks later when men in uniforms showed up at their house and bundled him on a non-stop flight to the Oresund Shatterdome. There, he’d been locked in a room with a blond boy covered in Bolognese sauce and forced to play video games with him for three hours while severe-looking people in white coats watched them. Eventually, after two hellish days of being poked, prodded and having pencil torches shone into his eyes while everyone refused to tell him where the bathroom was, a Major Hollola had told him he was being tested for drift compatibility with someone called Emil. It took him a few moments to realise that meant pasta-boy.

_“Ten seconds.”_

He didn’t understand why they were compatible. Both Tuuri and the major had tried to explain it to him, and he’d picked up a bit from drifting with Emil, but he still didn’t really get it. According to the scientists, they technically weren’t. But there was something wrong with his brain that meant he could sort of ‘piggyback’ people into the drift, taking the neural load of piloting while allowing them to do most of the fighting. So they weren’t _really_ compatible, except they kind of were… He didn’t know and he didn’t care. But he did know that Emil got very angry when people said there was something wrong with him, saying that it was a stupid thing to say if it meant he could pilot a Jaeger, and deep down he was kind of touched by that in a way he found difficult to articulate.

_“Neural handshake commencing. Drift initiating. Neural spike within tolerance. Jaeger: Viking Inferno, now active. Begin deployment sequence.”  
_

Here we go.

* * *

 

_Diving down into the depths, through the blue and the white and the rush of each other’s thoughts, two become one, man becomes machine.  
_

_A log cabin in the eastern forests, children playing by a lake. A grand house in a city suburb, bristling with expensive toys and gadgets. Schools and classrooms, tutors and private libraries. A young boy stares miserably out of an evacuation train window next to his cousins, a young boy watches from the stairs as refugees from the south arrive on their doorstep in the back of an army truck. The whisper of grass and ferns on skin, alone under the night sky. A tentative kiss on a summer afternoon. A small cross for absent parents on the mantelpiece of a run-down flat, a picture of two families in happier times. A glimpse through the crack of a doorway, a man looking tired and worn in the half-light of his desk lamp, with accounts books on his desk, brandy by his side and despair on his face.  
_

_Memories merge and mingle, shift and shuffle aimlessly like a deck of cards with no game to play. One feels the other’s panic, the acid churn in his stomach as he tries to play it cool while the numbers in his helmet tick down to zero. One feels the other’s calm, a serenity borne of ignorance and acquiescence. They thrive off the connection, learn from each other.  
_

_As they merge, they expand to fill the space. This steel shell becomes their skin. Carbon nanowires become their synapses, hydraulic pistons become their muscles, photochromic arrays are their new eyes. Left arm, right arm, flex and clench, hands clap together in perfect synchronicity. Shoulder joints are rolled as if to get the stiffness out them, as if this titan has woken from a deep slumber and is limbering up for war.  
_

_As close as they do combine, they take care not to surrender too much to this deep, intoxicating intimacy. They wonder sometimes if this is what those who were made into giants feel.  
_

_The Jaeger, gears gnashing as its voltaic heart spins up to full power, is bound by trusses and struts to a concrete cliff face in an artificial cavern. Doors grind open ahead of it, revealing the dusk and the storm outside. One by one, couplings are disconnected, walkways retract and charging gantries fold away. Beneath its feet, traction cars mobilise to shunt it towards the opening. Slowly it advances, like a god into the maelstrom._

* * *

 

Tuuri clung to the railings on the Shatterdome’s external observation deck and watched Viking begin its advance, rain soaking her to the bone and a massive grin plastered across her face.

Technically, as numerous bright yellow signs in five languages were warning her, she should _not_ be stood on a flimsy metal platform almost fifty metres in the air in a gale-force storm. Much less when a 16-storey robot was about to sweep past and the slightest miscalculation from the launch crew, or a particularly strong gust, could turn her into an interesting new stain on Viking Inferno’s armour. But she hadn’t missed a launch in the three years she had been maintaining her cousin’s Jaeger, and she had no intent of letting a little bit of drizzle stop her seeing this one.

In front of her, the bay doors finished opening and she faintly heard the all-clear bell’s tinny little ring over the howl of the storm. Silently she counted to twenty in her head, the routine of the launch like clockwork in her head. Nineteen, _twenty_ , and… yes, right on schedule, the Jaeger began to emerge from the launch bay. Suddenly all she saw was gleaming grey-red armour, rivets the size of her fist like pores on its skin. The view across the bay doors was cut off in an instant by the machine’s bulk.

It looked, as she had insisted to Emil last night, like someone had fused a human and a puma and then built a statue to commemorate the resulting mishmash. Clawed feet sprouted double-kneed, digitigrade legs whose art deco cowling gave the impression of elegantly sculpted musculature beneath the tungsten fibre armour. Atop those, connected by a slender waist, the Jaeger’s torso was almost completely human-looking aside from the several bandsaws that ran up its length, front and back, to deter anything from getting too firm a grip on the hull. Rainwater sluiced down from bulky shoulders, the enormous pauldrons shifting slightly as the Jaeger kept its balance in the face of the raging storm. Jutting out from the torso came a long neck on which a feline, angular head was mounted, scanning this way and that as its pilots looked out at the Oresund straits. The crown of the head was home to two triangular headlamps, huge UV-halogen arrays designed to burn and scour the infected flesh as the Jaeger moved in close. It was these that had been the main point of contention between mechanic and pilot previously – Emil’s stubborn pride was obviously too great to concede that he piloted a cat-eared Jaeger for a living. Tuuri’s grin widened slightly as she looked up at the conn-pod, imagining Emil fuming away in there.

Tuuri never felt smaller than when she watched the Jaeger launch. And to think, Viking Inferno was small by the standards of the old models! According to her old books and trading card collection, the old household names like Gipsy Danger, Striker Eureka and Romeo Blue had been almost eighty meters tall. What must it have been like to see them launch – and fight?

The Jaeger was almost free from the launch bay now, the last details of it coming into view from behind the reinforced concrete of the Oresund Shatterdome. The dorsal mortar tube and the arm-mounted flamer fuel tanks were the last to emerge, a little reminder that this 50-metre monster was not just an exercise in engineering and aesthetics (although gods knew it had both in spades, Tuuri thought) but a combat-ready war machine, about to ruin some giant’s day with all the power and precision of a lightning bolt from the heavens.

Still clutching the railing with one hand she raised the other in farewell. “Go get ‘em, guys!” she yelled over the storm, although she doubted Lalli and Emil would even be able to see her, let alone hear her over the wind and waves and machinery.

To her surprise, Viking seemed to acknowledge her presence. Its head tilted slightly towards her as if nodding goodbye, before turning to gaze upwards at the raging clouds above. Tuuri frowned slightly – _cloudgazing isn’t part of the mission, guys!_ – and followed the Jaeger’s line of sight upwards. Her grin vanished in an instant.

Approaching through the pounding rain and swirling winds, an enormous grey shape was ploughing through the air towards the Shatterdome. It took Tuuri a second or two to recognise it, even though she had seen it dozens of times before. _  
_

_That can’t be… oh no, oh no no no, that madwoman’s going to get everyone killed!_ she thought, eyes widening in horror. Her first instinct was to get back inside as fast as she could, partly to take cover and partly to warn someone, anyone, that Captain Eide had finally lost it.

Somehow audible over the storm, the Shatterdome’s AI spat out another status report over the tannoy.

_“KDM Træleopard approaching for harnessing manoeuvre. Jaeger: Viking Inferno reports all systems green. Storm conditions: worsening. Emergency crews on standby.”  
_

Only Captain Sigrun Eide would consider flying an airship, even if it was one of largest ever built, into a thunderstorm.

She had heard the AI spout that airship’s name all throughout the launch procedure but she’d never once put any thought into it. The _Træleopard_ always carried Viking Inferno out to its engagements; Captain Eide oversaw their little task force and had done so since it had been put together. It was the most ordinary thing in the world to hear the AI say she was standing by in that over-armed gasbag of hers – but the _Træleopard_ was _not_ designed to fly in weather like this. And yet here it came, barrelling out of the sky towards them as if 70 kph crosswinds and near-zero visibility was just another day on the job.

Swearing imaginatively, Tuuri turned and sprinted for the door back into the Shatterdome. There was a fine line between bravery and madness, and the Captain had just crossed that line at full speed ahead.

* * *

 

The _KDM Træleopard_ was the pride of the Danish Air Fleet, and just about the only thing operating out of the Oresund Shatterdome that wasn’t sixteen years old and held together with duct tape and prayer. Almost two hundred and fifty metres from her ceramic-composite armoured nose to the tip of her tail, longer if you counted the six sleek tailfins that arced out behind her like daggers, she was the last word in Danish aeronautical engineering. She was also the ultimate expression of modern combat doctrine, which stated that the closer a commander could get to the action on the ground while still remaining safe, the more effectively they could coordinate the fight. With an effective range that could take you from Iceland to Norway on a single battery charge, a dizzying array of command-and-control equipment, enough strength to haul a Jaeger through the sky and enough firepower to make even a giant think twice about sticking its heads out, _Træleopard_ was a force to be reckoned with in the new post-Rash world. It was said that the flag of the Nordic Defence Corps never flew prouder than when it flew from her flanks.

Whether or not that was the case, it had certainly never flown more nervously since Sigrun Eide had been promoted to captain.

On board the bridge of the _Træleopard_ , all was chaos. Klaxons wailed and warning lights flashed, automated voices barked out warnings about windspeed and altitude. Crewmembers sat in front of banks of screens, switches and dials and shouted out status reports or gazed in grim determination at their respective consoles, doing their level best to keep the _Træleopard_ from falling out of the sky. At the front of the bridge, where its metal sides gave way to massive armourglass viewing windows, helmsmen squinted out into the murk and the rain, their hands deftly playing over the levers that controlled the throttle and pitch of the six massive turbofans that whirred along her sides. Beneath everyone’s feet the deck of the bridge shifted and tilted as the storm outside tossed the _Træleopard_ back and forth.

Stood behind the helmsmen, bellowing instructions to three different people at once, was Captain Eide.

“OK, there they are!” she yelled and pointed out of the windows as if the helmsmen had somehow managed to miss the giant robot wading towards them. “Can you bring us up behind them?” she asked of one of them.

“I-I can try, but we’re getting way too much cross-” the poor man stuttered out of the corner of his mouth, not daring to take his eyes off the violent landscape in front of him.

“Good man!” Sigrun clapped him on the back and turned away, raising a hand to her ear where a small intercom relay nestled like a hearing aid. She bellowed over the weak protestations of the helmsman in front of her. “Harness control? You guys all set down there?”

“Ma’am? This is the gunnery…” came the crackling, static-laden response.

“Oh. Well, you guys stand by too,” Sigrun frowned, nonplussed, and yanked the earpiece out and fiddled with it. “Mikkel!” she bellowed across the bridge. “What channel’s the harness control on these days?”

On the other side of the bridge, ex-Head Researcher and current Chief Officer Mikkel Madsen stood impassively and watched the pandemonium around him with folded arms. Budget cuts had forced endless personnel reassignments in the Oresund Shatterdome, and he was still quietly annoyed that he was expected to leave behind his laboratories and operating theatres to babysit this madwoman through the skies whenever she felt like it. “Channel six,” he called back. “Same as it ever was.”

“Then why…”

“Have you put the earpiece in upside down again?”

“…I dunno.”

“Hmph.”

“Oh, cheer up Mikkel!” Sigrun cried, striding across the deck towards him and pausing to let an unsecured swivel chair scoot past, followed by a very dismayed midshipman with a long red braid. “You just try and tell me this isn’t fun!” Mikkel scowled and tried not to let on that there was a tiny part of him that sort of agreed with her.

“So what’s the latest?” Sigrun asked with a predatory smile.

Mikkel checked one of the screens on the wall next to him. “Nothing new,” he reported. “Thing’s still heading south out of Copenhagen, away from us and back into the Silent Zone. That Icelandic destroyer’s following it as best she can from the coast but they don’t want to get too close in case they wake anything else up.”

“Hmm. We got a name for it yet?” Sigrun asked, stroking her chin and looking at a map of the ruins of Copenhagen that had popped up on another screen.

“Yup. Just came down from command. Giant 10-19-b has been christened: Hjorten.” He smirked, mirthlessly. “It’s a boy.”

Three days ago now, Hjorten had crawled out of the Hamburg Silent Zone and gone on a rampage across the North Sea. Ambushing a British fishing convoy, it had helped itself to a few sailors before having a more even-sided encounter with a trio of Icelandic battleships. One of those battleships was now a wreck on the seabed and another was limping into the British shipyards in the Wash for emergency repairs. The remaining battleship, _Túnfiskurinn_ , had put up a better fight and had chased Hjorten across the North Sea and Kattegat and into the ruins of Copenhagen – whereupon the Nordic Defence Council had decided it was a matter for Captain Eide’s taskforce and their Jaeger, Viking Inferno.

“Captain!” one of the helmsmen shouted from the front of the bridge. “We’re ready to harness! Oh, and we’re getting radio traffic from Oresund. One of the engineering crew wants to speak to you. I keep telling her this is the wrong channel, but…”

Sigrun grinned at Mikkel and raised her eyebrows. “Showtime!”

She dashed back across the bridge, deftly dodging another escaping chair – or maybe it was the same one if the increasingly desperate midshipman stumbling after it was any indication – and skidded to a halt in front of the armourglass windows. Below her, Viking Inferno reared up out of the thrashing sea, its metal hide glittering in the light of the _Træleopard’s_ roving floodlights and the occasional burst of lighting.

She picked up a radio microphone from in front of the helmsman who had called her over, realised it was actually a coffee mug, put it back down and picked up the actual microphone. “ _Træleopard_ to Oresund,” she shouted into it. “What seems to be the problem?”

 _“Sigrun, what are you doing!?”_ came Tuuri’s voice out of the speakers. _“Have you lost your mind? Træleopard’s not rated for_ forty _kph crosswinds, let alone seventy! Do you_ ever _read the weather reports!? Get out of here before you crash, Viking can walk to Copenhagen on his own!”  
_

Sigrun laughed. “Oh ye of little faith! Tuuri, you ever captained this ship?”

_“What? No, but that doesn’t mean-”  
_

“Honey, you’re an engineer. You know what this ship was built for. But I’ve been flying her for three years now and I know what she can _take_. Watch and learn!”

She clicked the line closed and tossed the microphone back down, unaware that it was actually a pen and the helmsman had just been holding his own microphone up at her and hoping for the best. She span on her heel to face the bridge, lightning crackling behind her as she did so.

“Alright everyone!” she yelled over the sirens and the groans of the _Træleopard’s_ tortured metal skeleton. “Hold on to something!”

 _Træleopard_ swept down out of the sky like a bloated bird of prey, turbofans screaming against the storm. Below it, dangling from its central gondola, hung a complicated network of cables and clamps that looked like a monstrous spider’s web designed to catch a fly of truly epic proportions. As Viking Inferno braced itself, this harness slammed into its back with an almighty great crash. Electromagnetic clamps thrummed into life, hydraulic jaws clamped shut, drill bits meshed and burrowed into ports on the Jaeger’s steel skin. A tremendous jolt ran up through the harness to the _Træleopard_ , sending it scudding and swerving around this sudden anchor point. Inside Viking’s conn-pod, Emil and Lalli were sent stumbling forward and Viking copied their movements, staggering under the impact of the airship above it. For one dreadful, awful second the Jaeger looked ready to collapse, the airship ready to fall. And then, slowly, impossibly, the Jaeger regained its balance. The _Træleopard_ , turbofans clawing at the air and roaring under the strain, began to haul it into the sky. Small booster jets on the Jaeger’s back flared bright yellow, helping take the strain off of the complaining ship above.

To almost synchronised cheers from Viking’s conn-pod, _Træleopard’s_ bridge and the Oresund engineering bay, Viking Inferno rose slowly from the straits underneath it. Climbing more rapidly with every second, _Træleopard_ swung around and pointed her nose towards the distant shoreline.

Ahead of them, Copenhagen brooded under the stormy sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really wasn’t sure whether a Pacific Rim crossover should have the crew fighting kaiju, or the crew fighting giants in much smaller Jaegers. I hope I’ve found an acceptable compromise.  
> And the giant’s name is a reference to the ill-fated precursor of the Dalahasten train – that, and a giant simply called ‘the deer’ kind of tickles me.


	2. Interlude - Meet the Team

Email to: Torbjorn.Vasterstrom@nordicdefencecorps.staff.se

Cc: Taru.Hollola@nordicdefencecorps.staff.se

Subject: RE: Website Drafts

 

Mr Västerström

Your drafts for the NDC website’s FAQs and staff pages, with my annotations marked in bold. Aside from a few minor adjustments, I would say they're ready to be uploaded.

 

General Trond Andersen

  **  
**

* * *

 

_[Note to self: delete EVERYTHING in italics before sending this off to that old windbag Trond. We don’t want a repeat of last time!]_

**_[No, Mr Västerström, we certainly would not want a repeat of last time, would we? And feel free to call me what you like, but just remember that I gave you a job, an office, and that the shareholders of Västerström Industries might still be very interested to know who swindled them out of 80 million kronor, hmm? – Trond]_ **

  
 

** Frequently Asked Questions **

Compiled by Torbjorn Västerström, Head of NDC Public Relations

 

Here at the Nordic Defence Corps, we realise that the post-Rash world can often be a confusing one. With this in mind, here is a list of frequently asked questions that our expert civilian liaison teams have had to field many times over the years.

 

Q: Is there a cure for the Rash?

A: No. There is currently no cure, vaccine or palliative for the Rash Illness available at the current time. The NDC emphasises that so-called ‘alternative’ cures and preventatives such as juniper extract and cat blood have been scientifically proven to have no effect. However, NDC researchers and members of the international scientific community are investigating many promising avenues of research at this time. _[Are they!?] **[No. – Trond]**_

 

Q: How I find out if I am immune?

A: Those needing to travel outside of safezones and cleansed areas will be tested for immunity, and will be required to adjust travel plans accordingly. Other citizens are encouraged to book an immunity test with their doctor or nurse. Don’t forget, the current immunity rate stands at 10.5% of the population – you could be one of the lucky few!

For more information, consult our dedicated webpage on the Rash and Immunity.

 

Q: I am considering travel outside a safezone. What do I need?

A: There are three important things to remember upon leaving a safezone:

  1. First and foremost, inform your local authorities of your intent to travel and obtain the relevant permits. The penalty for unauthorised travel in the Nordic Council nations is ten years hard labour.
  2. Carry a breathing mask with you at all times. **_[Try wearing it, too. – Trond]_**
  3. If you encounter and infected organism, remember the Rules of Survival (see our page on survival here). _[Does that whole ‘stand still, stay silent’ nonsense actually work?] **[No-one’s ever come back to say it doesn’t. – Trond]**_



 

Q: What should I do in the event of a giant attack?

A: Citizens are advised to remain prepared for a giant attack at all times. Remember these key points:

  * If you hear the warning sirens, proceed calmly to your nearest shelter.
  * If no shelter is available, or you have been caught out in the open, find the nearest available hiding spot and attempt to conceal yourself from the giant as best you can.
  * Under no circumstances should you attempt to fight, distract or otherwise engage with the giant.
  * Remain calm, a Jaeger will be deployed to your location shortly.



 

Q: What is the NDC? _[I can’t believe people need to ask this.] **[Finally, something we agree on. – Trond]**_

A: The Nordic Defence Corps is the military wing of the Nordic Council, comprised of military assets from Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Our avowed aim is the defence of the Nordic nations from the Rash Illness and those that carry the disease. The NDC acts in conjunction with the armed forces of its five member nations, and is actively involved in research and counter-terrorism as well as its primary Jaeger operations.

For more information about the operations of the NDC, as well as exciting job opportunities amongst our ranks, please refer to our main information page.

 

Q: Surely military action on this scale as a matter for NATO or the EDF?

A: Following NATO’s decision to commence the nuclear bombardment of London despite only perfunctory attempts at evacuation, the members of the NDC left NATO in protest. _[Yeah, that and Stockholm was next on the list.]_ **_[Actually it was Oslo, then Stockholm. And such remarks are unprofessional, Mr Västerström. – Trond]_** Likewise, the EU’s poor ability to coordinate the evacuations of Italy and Portugal was seen as reason enough for the Nordic nations to leave. Currently, the nations of the Nordic Council are proud to rely only on each other for military support.

 

Q: What is the Rash Cult?

A: The Rash Cult, also known as the Church of God’s Will and the Latter Day Adventists, is a quasi-religious terrorist organisation based around the belief that the Rash Illness is a gift from God. Members of the Cult claim that the Rash Illness will advance humanity to the next level of evolution, and wage ‘holy war’ against any people and organisations that attempt to combat its spread. The Rash Cult evolved from the Kaiju Cult, which was active in the Pacific Rim region during the Kaiju War of 2014-2025, and currently has cells on five continents.

The NDC is proud to say that, thanks to the watchfulness and diligence of our counter-terrorism branch, the Rash Cult has gained little to no foothold in the nations of the Nordic Council. Nevertheless, the NDC warns citizens that constant vigilance should be maintained against the Cult. Citizens are encouraged to report any and all suspicious activity to your local law enforcement agencies, and are reminded that there is a standing reward of 5,000 kronor for information that leads to an arrest.

Any rumours that high-ranking members of the Nordic Council are members of, or funded by, the Rash Cult are categorically untrue. This is all the NDC has to say on this matter at the present time.

For more information on the Rash Cult, and details of suspicious activity to be alert for, please refer to our page ‘Know Your Enemy’.

_[Should I put in those speculations about the cult getting funded by biotech firms looking to get their hands on Rash samples?] **[ABSOLUTELY NOT. Those firms also fund us to get their hands on samples – we cannot go around making such accusations about our biggest financiers! – Trond]**_

Q: I have been hearing rumours about mages. What are they?

A: Stories of people who can perform magical feats – usually referred to as mages or witches/wizards – have abounded since ancient times. The NDC would like to remind citizens that, no matter what advocates of New Paganism claim, no compelling or scientifically verified evidence for the existence of magic has been found. _[Are we sure about this?? Emil was telling me about that Hotakainen boy he pilots with…] **[We are keeping that asset under wraps, Mr Västerström – and kindly tell your nephew to keep his mouth shut on classified matters in future. – Trond]**_

_[We get a lot of questions about how we’re coping with reduced funding these days – must ask Trond what our official stance is on that at some point.]_

**_[Officially, the NDC is not hurting for funds and remains an efficient fighting force, despite recent setbacks and the loss of two Jaegers. However, you might want to discreetly post a link to our donations site somewhere on this FAQ page, and point out we accept cash, cheque, most credit cards and scrap metal. – Trond]_ **

_  
_

* * *

 

** Meet the Team **

**  
**

Compiled by Torbjorn Västerström, Head of the NDC Public Relations

 

_[Trond wants me to interview all of these people? Can’t I just pull their personnel files and sketch them up from those?]_

**_[What do I even pay you for? – Trond]_ **

 

General Trond Andersen

Director of NDC Operations West and overseer of the Oresund Shatterdome.

Previously of the Norwegian Army, General Trond Andersen has served in the NDC since its founding in 2025. His current role as Director of Operations West places the defence of Norway, Denmark and south-west Sweden under his command, a role he has excelled in despite his advancing age. _[Hobbies include kicking puppies, stealing from orphans and blackmailing honest, hardworking people into becoming his accursed PR lackey.]_

**_[Mr Västerström, I must object. I have never once kicked a puppy, never stolen from anyone, and if I did ‘encourage’ someone to take on the role of Head of the PR Department, they most certainly were not honest or hardworking. – Trond]_ **

 

Admiral Louis Olsen

Commander of the Danish Air Fleet and second-in-command of the Oresund Shatterdome.

_[This man broke my dictaphone. Must bill Trond for its replacement, and for some earplugs.] **[Get your own. – Trond]**_

Following a prestigious career in the Royal Danish Navy, Admiral Louis Olsen was appointed vice-commander of the Air Fleet in 2032. After his courageous actions in the Siege of Nyborg, where he co-ordinated three war zeppelins against the attacking giants by shouting over the black noise jamming the radio communications, he was promoted to Admiral in 2038 and has commanded the Air Fleet ever since.

 

Captain Sigrun Eide

Commander of the Viking Inferno Strike Force and captain of the _KDM Træleopard_.

Hailing from the small fishing village of Dalsnes in Norway, Captain Sigrun Eide knew she wanted to join the armed forces from the day she was old enough to hold a rifle. She was conscripted into the Norwegian Army aged 16 during the Plague Year, where she served with distinction during the defence of the Fjordane Safezone. Applying to join the NDC in 2029 as a pilot for the recently-commissioned Jaeger Shrike Intrepid, she was sadly turned down due the unavailability of a drift compatible co-pilot. She joined the Danish Air Fleet in 2030, and was promoted to captain of the _KDM Træleopard_ in 2038 following the death of Captain Sørensen in the Siege of Nyborg. Captain Eide is notable for being the only person in history to have killed a giant with a flare gun.

 _[She_ was _joking about that thing with the flare gun… right?] **[Wrong. – Trond]**_

 

Ranger Emil Västerström

Pilot of Viking Inferno.

Born to the prestigious Västerström lineage in 2022, Emil Västerström excelled academically from an early age. Eschewing a career in his family’s company in favour of serving his country, Emil joined the NDC in the summer of 2039 as a trainee pilot. Within a few months, and with simulator scores at the top of his class, he was given command of Viking Inferno at the age of just 19 along with his co-pilot Lalli Hotakainen. He is the youngest Jaeger pilot on record, and Viking Inferno has achieved 5 kills in his short time in the conn-pod.

**_[I couldn’t possibly begin to guess he’s related to you, Mr Västerström. – Trond]_ **

 

Ranger Lalli Hotakainen

Pilot of Viking Inferno.

_[Does Trond seriously expect me to get anything from this guy!? I approached him for an interview this morning in the mess hall and he threw a pine cone at me and ran off! Where did he even get one from on this base? We found him asleep under a bunk two hours later. And poor Emil has to pilot with him??]_

Born in Helsinki in 2022, Lalli Hotakainen lost both parents to the Rash Illness during the Plague Year. Evacuated to the Saimaa safezone where he lived for most of his life, Lalli was brought to the attention of the NDC after his drift-assessment scores tallied unusually well with those of Ranger Emil Västerström. After tests confirmed their drift compatibility, he was assigned to pilot the Jaeger Viking Inferno alongside Emil. Lalli speaks only his native Finnish, but has showed signs of picking up Swedish through repeated drifting with his co-pilot. As a result, he is a seminal case study in the emerging field of neuro-linguistics. _[How can we tell? Has he ever spoken?]_

 

Head Researcher/Chief Officer Dr Mikkel Madsen

Head of NDC Sci-Ops and Chief Officer of the _KDM Træleopard_.

Graduating from Aalborg University in 2032 with a first-class degree in medicine, Dr Mikkel Madsen went on to do post-doctoral studies in Xenopathology with an emphasis on research into the Rash Illness. As a result, he is considered a world-class expert on the Rash Illness and carries out his research from the Oresund Shatterdome’s dedicated laboratory facilities. Due to recent personnel reassignments, he is also Chief Officer of the _KDM Træleopard_ and plays an active commanding role in the Viking Inferno Strike Force. _[I think this man is a lot smarter than Trond gives him credit for. I mean, I’d never even_ heard _of face cancer before…] **[No doubt. – Trond]**_

 

Vice-Corporal Tuuri Hotakainen 

Chief Mechanic of the Viking Inferno Strike Force and LOCCENT Controller for NDC Operations West.

Cousin to Ranger Lalli Hotakainen, Vice-Corporal Tuuri Hotakainen was trained as a mechanic in the Saimaa dockyards from the age of twelve. When Lalli was found to be drift-compatible with Ranger Västerström she jumped at the chance to work with the NDC, and in three short years has risen to become the Chief Mechanic of Viking Inferno. Due to personnel reassignments, she also takes on the role of LOCCENT (Local Command Centre) Controller for Operations West when her schedule allows, meaning she often has the opportunity to support her cousin in combat.

_[I was going to interview her brother – apparently he’s LOCCENT Controller for NDC East, I thought I could run the ‘brother and sister’ angle a bit – but I rang him up and all he did was cry and ask if Tuuri was OK. Might not bother after all.]_

 

Midshipman Reynir Árnason

Crewmember aboard the _KDM Træleopard_.

_[DO NOT upload this guy’s profile with the rest of them!! The public would probably lynch us if they knew this wet blanket was part of our organisation. This is here so I’ve got something to test the website’s formatting with. I think I only interviewed him to see if my new dictaphone works.]_

Born in the back-end of Iceland, Midshipman Reynir Árnason lived a carefree life for twenty years on his parent’s sheep farm. Following the sudden realisation one day that he’d been wasting his life, he ran off to join the merchant navy. Or he would have, had he not accidentally got into a crate of spare parts bound for the Oresund Shatterdome. Upon being discovered, he was given a job by General Andersen because our esteemed military commander couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork to send him back home. _[I swear to God this is the story he told me.]_ Reynir is a devout follower of New Paganism, and all his fellow sailors on the _Træleopard_ are no doubt just thrilled to find the next batch of protective runes he’s scrawled across everything. _[Kid gave me a good-luck rune when I wrapped up the interview! Just scrawled it out on a napkin! If this is the calibre of people manning the Air Fleet it’s a wonder the zeppelins don’t crash out of despair.]_

****

**_[All in all I would say you’ve captured the mood of our dysfunctional little family quite well, Mr Västerström. I’ll simply say this, though – this has been the second time you have sent your ‘annotations’ along with the actual content, and I don’t want there to be a third. If there is, I’ll make your Christmas bonus dependant on getting an hour-long interview out of Ranger Hotakainen. Do I make myself clear? – Trond]_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not too great at multi-chapter works, so this might get shunted around if it wrecks the pacing of later chapters. It’s something I knocked together to help me get around writer’s block for the rest of the story, and it's not vital for understanding following chapters – really, all it’s here to do is explain why Tuuri the mechanic is suddenly sat behind the LOCCENT desk next chapter. Well, that and hint about what Lalli’s contribution to piloting the Jaeger might involve…


	3. Chapter 3

It was dark by the time the small troll had plucked up enough courage to make its move.

It had been loitering around the edge of the nest for a few days now, watching enviously as others like it came and went. They left every sundown and returned just before the dawn, lugging the day’s prey back with them, carcasses of cats and deer and dogs. The nest, deep in the basement of some old building, offered excellent protection from the sun and the cold. Those who called it home had grown strong, but it was not the kind of place where a runt like the small troll was welcome – it would be shunned if it was lucky, rendered down for spare flesh if it wasn’t.

But they had not come back this time. Odd.

Maybe it had something to do with the Many that had entered the city earlier. The small troll had seen it, briefly, as it passed along a street earlier that night. A thundering mass of legs and eyes and armour, flanks the size of buildings, the unmistakable reek of arrogance about it. _We are the strongest here_ , it had seemed to say, O _ur power is unmatched. Join with Us, or get out of Our way._

The small troll had avoided it. It had vague, dim-distant memories of being victimised and bullied by a similar attitude, back when it had been some _one_ as opposed to some _thing_. So it kept its head down and laid low, cowering as the Many passed by even though it was unlikely that such a pathetic specimen would even catch the Many’s attention. After all, you could never be too careful.

Now, it decided that it was not going to get a better chance. Breaking from cover next to an abandoned car, it scampered across the flooded street and disappeared into the nest. It emerged a few minutes later with its prize clamped in its jaws: the decaying corpse of a cat. A few maggots squirmed amongst the remains of matted fur, flecks of white against the dark putrefying body. Squinting against the driving rain, the troll made its way back across the street and hunkered down under and old parapet. The weather was terrible out here – the troll was already soaked and shivering – but it would be a bad idea to stay behind in the nest. In case the others came back.

The troll tucked into the carcass, gnawing ravenously on the slick, stinking meat. It kept one eye open for any signs of trouble. From up above came the flash of lightning and, a few seconds later, the roar of thunder.

And then came the roar of something that was _not_ thunder.

The small troll looked up in confusion that quickly became terror. High above it, something monstrous was bulldozing its way through the sky. It was a pitch-black hole in the sky, the only solidity in the whirl of wind and water. Fingers of light pointed down from it, sweeping across the ruined and crumbling city scape, playing over walls and peering through windows. The howl of its passage was loud enough to drown out even the din of the storm. And below it, suspended beneath this monster on a web of steel, hung something even worse – something the troll almost recognised.

The leviathan was overhead for perhaps a second and then it was gone, the rumble of its passing echoing after it. It sped off southwards – the same direction, the troll noted, that the Many had headed not too long ago.

Carefully, it picked the carcass up in its mouth and crossed the street for a third time, back into the old building. Maybe it was better to take its chances in the nest after all. After all, you could never be too careful.

 

* * *

 

" _ETA to deployment zone: thirty minutes. Jaeger: Viking Inferno prepare for combat drop. KDM Træleopard prepare for tactical uplink to LOCCENT.”_ The Jaeger’s AI churned out another status report as the _Træleopard_ scudded through the skies over the suburbs of Copenhagen, Viking Inferno dangling beneath it like some enormous marionette puppet. Inside the conn-pod, Emil started to go through the list of pre-drop checks. Switches flicked and holographic interfaces blinked under his touch. Seismic sensors in the feet were brought online, stabiliser jets mounted on the Jaeger’s flanks prepared to fire. The leg joints shifted their geometries slightly as aerogel shock-absorbers inflated in readiness for the impact of the drop. Weapons systems glittered green across his HUD, buzzsaws, blades, flamethrowers and mortars jostling eagerly for attention in front of his face like schoolchildren trying to get picked first for some murderous sports team. He flicked through them expertly, testing motors, priming pumps, loading the mortar tubes and experimentally deploying and retracting the forearm blades. Viking Inferno jostled and fidgeted impatiently in its harness as he ran down the list.

It would have been a lot faster with two people performing the checks, but Emil was used to working on his own.

He paused, glancing across the conn-pod to where Lalli stood in his drivesuit. To his left, his co-pilot was staring coolly out at the suburbs of Copenhagen flashing past beneath them, his lips working wordlessly. Emil didn’t need to know Finnish to get the gist of what Lalli was saying – the drift translated it well enough.

Lalli was praying.

 Emil remembered the time when he had first seen Lalli do this. It must have been about three years ago now, back on their first active combat drop. They’d been assigned as Shrike Intrepid’s wingman, the two of them deployed into the Oslo Exclusion Zone against a giant called Grymhet. It was supposed to have been a standard live-fire training exercise: the more experienced Jaeger showing the younger crew the ropes. And it had gone well, he supposed, right up until Grymhet had ambushed Shrike Intrepid and taken the older Jaeger’s head clean off of its shoulders. Grymhet had then turned its attention to the panicking Viking Inferno even as its decapitated commander was still crumpling to the ground, tearing off one arm and clawing deep holes in its torso. Emil had been ready to activate their Jaeger’s self-destruct mechanisms – anything rather than let the giant have them – when he had heard Lalli’s voice wafting across the drift towards him, measured and rhythmic despite the boy’s clear terror. The drift carried the meaning too, warped and distorted by fear but clear enough nevertheless: _help us, please, I beg you_.

Grymhet had started pummelling the conn-pod seconds later and Emil had blacked out, so he didn’t remember what happened next. But he had seen the after-action reports, seen the videos of the ground opening up and swallowing the giant in a torrent of crumbling concrete and broken stone. The official explanation was that a subway station below the giant, weakened by sixteen years of neglect and the hammering of the fight above it, had collapsed at just the right moment. Ranger Hotakainen had acted with remarkable speed to take advantage of the situation considering his rookie status, delivering a swift stunning blow to the giant and torching it with Viking’s one remaining flamer, but there was nothing to suggest anything out of the ordinary.

That may have been the official explanation but _un_ officially Emil wasn’t so sure. There had been other incidents too, such as when a sudden spray of water had blinded the giant Häger as Viking fought it to a standstill off the coast of Skutskär. Or when not one drop of Koloss’ acidic bile had touched the Jaeger during their desperate defence of the Trondheim Citadel, even as it vomited streams of the stuff from its gaping mouths. All perfectly explicable and yet… he wasn’t so sure.

So he let Lalli pray as he ran through the checklist. After all, he thought, it was only thanks to Lalli’s extraordinary brain that the two of them were able to drift at all. His title of Ranger – a dream come true for Emil ever since he had seen the old news videos of Striker Eureka and Gipsy Danger on the internet – was solely due to his co-pilot. Truth be told, he hated the asymmetric way they were forced to pilot: him taking the initiative and Lalli following as best he could, weighed down by the neural load of keeping Emil in the drift. But it gave Lalli the freedom to do his thing, undistracted by the urgency of combat, and Emil had learned to be grateful for that over the years.

Even so, Emil was curious. _Who are you praying to?_ he sent through the drift. The thought more than the words themselves was what was carried between them. The curiosity in Emil was mimicked in Lalli’s head, and the answers there duplicated across in return.

_Ukko. God of thunderstorms. Kind of appropriate. And you?_ came the reply.

_What?  
_

_Who are you praying to?  
_

_I’m not praying to anyone_ , Emil shot back, his confusion deepening.

Lalli turned his head just far enough so Emil could see his smirk. _Oh, come on._ He pointed at the HUD display before Emil, still showing the weapons displays. _Ritual gestures, arcane symbols, muttered words – a spell if ever I saw one._

_Those are pre-drop checks! You really should know that!_ Emil knew that Lalli was just teasing him but felt a little jolt of annoyance regardless. That was the problem with letting people into your head – they always ended up knowing exactly which buttons to press. _And I wasn’t muttering_ , he huffed.

“You just called the left flamer a ‘bloody bastard’ when it wouldn’t pump,” Lalli vocalised in fluent, if heavily accented, Swedish. Emil blinked in surprise. It had been so long since he’d heard his co-pilot speak he’d almost forgotten what his voice sounded like. _I didn’t even need the drift to hear that_ , Lalli continued.

Emil was about to protest when the radio in his drivesuit helmet crackled into life and an ear-splitting bellow burst from it. In front of them, a small screen popped open in the Jaeger’s HUD and they were suddenly face-to-face with a stout man in an admiral’s uniform.

“Ah, our brave young warriors!” boomed the voice of Admiral Olsen around the conn-pod.

_Oh, not Old Foghorn_ , Emil and Lalli thought in perfect synchronicity. _  
_

 

* * *

 

Ten kilometres away, surrounded by holographic displays and keyboards, Tuuri sat at the control desk of the Oresund LOCCENT room and tried to work out if her medical insurance would pay for a new set of eardrums.

The LOCCENT room was hardly the calmest of places at the best of times, and now was certainly not the best of times. She would have been able to deal with the constant wail of klaxons and sirens as thirty different telemetry systems tried to warn her that the _Træleopard_ was flying in unsafe conditions. But that coupled with Admiral ‘Foghorn’ Olsen to one side of her and General Trond on the other? There was a reason she kept a small pack of over-the-counter painkillers in a drawer under her desk. She could already feel a headache coming on.

To her right, Olsen was bellowing across a video link to Viking’s conn-pod, wishing Emil and Lalli good luck or something like that. His voice was so loud Tuuri was actually finding it difficult to figure out what he was saying. Admiral Olsen had clearly decided he needed to raise his voice just a smidgen to make himself heard over all the warning sirens coming from LOCCENT – and when that man rose his voice a smidgen, the mountains fell and the valleys were filled in. On the other end of the link she could see Emil desperately clawing at the side of his drivesuit helmet, trying to find the volume control for his earphones. Next to him, Lalli turned his head and looked at her with pleading eyes. Tuuri realised he could probably see her on the edge of the screen.

Recognising instantly what her cousin was asking her to do, she reached across and turned a small volume knob on the base of the microphone Olsen was using down to its minimum setting. “Just adjusting the equaliser!” she smiled up at him as he frowned down at her. “Want to make sure they can hear you over all this racket, after all.”

“Good thinking, Vice-Corporal!” Olsen roared and continued his motivational speech to the two pilots. On the screen Emil’s struggles slowly stopped and Lalli sagged in visible relief. Tuuri grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen from one of her desk drawers and scrawled out _You guys owe me an ice cream each._ She held up the sign over Olsen’s shoulder, to a pair of vigorous nods.

She sat back in her chair and did her best to discreetly cover her ears. On her other side General Trond was also talking to someone over the radio – the captain of that Icelandic destroyer, she thought – but thankfully he wasn’t raising his voice. Trond rarely needed to.

“Captain Ása, you misunderstand me,” he was saying. “You _will_ remain in the straits and you _will_ stand ready in case the giant tries to escape by sea. This is not a request, this an official order from a Shatterdome commander under active deployment conditions. By Nordic Council law, you are required to render what assistance you can. And if you don’t, I do wonder just how many people would be interested to learn of that particular incident in Trondheim… what? Oh, you will after all? Well that’s just splendid, don’t let me keep you.” He killed the connection and looked over at her. “Navy,” he muttered like it was a dirty word. Tuuri shrugged.

“Any developments?” Trond asked, peering through his spectacles at the data readouts on Tuuri’s LOCCENT terminal. “Nothing new,” she replied. “Interception should go as planned.” She pointed to two dots on a map of Copenhagen, one blood red and one sky blue. Hjorten and _Træleopard_. Their predicted paths were sketched out in dotted lines on the holographic screen, a small clock where they intersected counting down the minutes.

“Good,” he said. “How soon until we get coverage?”

“Not long now, I think.”

“Let me know when we do,” Trond replied. He turned on his heel and stalked off, motioning for some aide trailing behind him to follow.

Tuuri pulled up another window on the main screen just as a small message box popped up to tell her: “Access granted.” _Speak of the devil_ , she thought, and grinned. Finally her little pet project was about to bear fruit.

Back in the years before the Plague – before the start of the Kaiju War, even – when the United States had still been united, the ailing and paranoid superpower had embarked on one of the most ambitious surveillance projects in human history. Called Project Panopticon in that old American tradition of giving everything a slightly overblown name, it had been an interlinked network of twenty-seven satellites equipped with some of the most advanced surveillance technology available at the time. They had been capable of seeing across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and peering through the thickest clouds, or even beneath the earth itself with ground-penetrating radar and ultra-sensitive thermal cameras. Equipped with on-board nuclear reactors with enough fuel for a century and experimental nanotechnological repair mechanisms to deal with the increasing threat of space debris, they were the pinnacle of American aerospace engineering. Thirty years later the Panopticon satellites still lingered on, although like the nation that had built them they were a shadow of their former glory. One by one they had fallen to debris collisions, decaying orbits and software crashes. One had accidentally been eaten by its own nanomachines. Now only a few remained, gazing forlornly down on a world that had changed almost beyond recognition, still sending back data to their masters in Washington and Langley.

And there was one fewer satellite in the Panopticon network now, because Tuuri had just stolen it.

It had been the product of more than a year’s work, carefully worming her way through the old CIA firewalls and security systems. The hardest part had actually been adjusting to the ancient software and hardware the Atlantic States government still used – after almost half a century without a major network overhaul, their systems and those of the Nordic Defence Corps were almost utterly incompatible. It had been like trying to use a supercomputer to hack clockwork. But once she had finally gotten around that obstacle she had found the security there to be laughable. It had been the work of a few months to secretly insert her own snippets of code into their network, wriggling software worms through old security loopholes that no-one had ever bothered to close. Now, with a few gestures into the holographic screen in front of her, she reached out into that network and sent off a packet of commands.

Almost immediately error messages started to flock her screen. She raised an eyebrow and smirked. _Faster than I thought you’d be_ , she thought.

The NDC security firewalls had detected a small packet-sniffer worm lurking on the edges of their own intranet. Tuuri didn’t need three guesses to work out where it had come from. Such a clumsy and blatant attack had Langley’s fingerprints all over it: the Atlantic States Security Bureau trying to work out who was making a mockery of its cyber-security, no doubt. Deftly, she ordered the NDC security systems to quarantine and dissect the worm, spilling the guts of its code out onto the screen in front of her. She made a few quick adjustments and sent it back out into the net, flitting back home with malicious new purpose.

“Sorry, guys,” she muttered to herself with a grin that stopped just short of being outright evil. She imagined some poor Security Bureau techie’s eyes going wide with horror as they cracked open the worm to find all the malware she’d just dumped inside of it. Some small part of her wondered if she might just have caused a diplomatic incident, but she ignored it. The NDC had long petitioned the Americans for time on their spy satellites, even offering to buy one of them back in the days before its budget had been slashed. But they’d always been rebuffed. The Americans were apparently too busy spying on the squabbling federations of China or the carcass of Russia to bother helping their erstwhile allies.

With Langley out of the picture, Tuuri sent off the command packet once more. From a speaker above her, the Oresund AI parroted Viking Inferno: _“ETA to deployment zone: twenty minutes.”  
_

She reached for her radio microphone. Time to give the guys the good news.

 

* * *

 

High above, locked in geostationary orbit above Northern Europe, satellite PNOPT-11 received an interesting new order. For decades it had been staring dutifully down at the eastern Baltic Sea, waiting for Russia’s fleets there to make any new movements, blissfully unaware that the warships it had been watching so carefully were now nothing but rusting husks filled with corpses. Now, it seemed its masters had something more exciting for it to observe. Old software routines, grown cluttered and bloated over billions of computer cycles, were roused from their slumber. Armoured casings cracked and hinged open as cameras swivelled and blinked their shutters. Tiny white bursts of propellant nudged the satellite into a new position and it gazed instead at what was left of the city of Copenhagen, buried beneath an ink-black smudge of cloud. Analytical algorithms started to pick apart the new data with something approaching glee, searching happily for the signs they had been trained to recognise: the engine heat of armoured columns, the subtle wakes of submarines, the cracks in the sky left behind by supersonic fighters.

What they found, scuttling amongst the ruins of the dead city, confused them.

 

* * *

 

“Viking, this is Oresund, you copy?” Tuuri’s voice on the radio.

“Loud and clear. Mint choc chip or strawberry?” replied Lalli.

“What? Oh! Umm… why not both? One each. But that’s not-”

_[something in the sky]  
_

“-wanted to tell you guys, I’ve got a present for-”

_[something coming for Us]  
_

“Tuuri, you’re breaking up. We’re getting a lot of static on this channel, over.” Emil scowled and flicked a few switches. “Damn black noise,” he muttered.

Lalli said nothing. Where most heard the mindless hiss of the Silent Zone static, he heard something more.

_[an iron cloud a metal man a giant like Us]_

_[can you hear Us? We think you can]  
_

_[here to kill Us to crush Us to burn Us to quiet Us]  
_

_[We shall see]_

 

* * *

 

“Captain! We’ve reached the drop zone!” one of the _Træleopard’s_ helmsmen called across the bridge. His co-pilot pulled back on the controls and the _Træleopard_ shuddered and creaked as her turbofans went into full reverse. Shedding speed, she came to a slow halt above an old city square. The zeppelin’s bulk was so great that it shielded the square almost completely from the rain, apart from the water that poured from its flanks onto the old and broken cobblestones.

Beneath _Træleopard_ , Viking Inferno clenched its fists in anticipation.

For Sigrun, the opening moments of a battle were always the same. She took a moment to calm herself. Excitement, euphoria, they could come later. When – if – they won. But now any traces of her goofy façade vanished like cellophane on a bonfire, and what remained was not Sigrun Eide the madwoman who flew in hurricanes or who had killed a giant with a sidearm, but the Sigrun Eide who had never lost a battle and who fully intended to win the war.

She glared out at the ruined rooftops of Copenhagen as the _Træleopard’s_ tactical HUD sprouted across the armourglass windows, embedded chromophores and micro-holographic projectors bursting into life in a riot of colour. Satellite imagery from the Panopticon network was overlaid onto the view, picking out the dim silhouettes of buildings in glowing blue wireframe. Heat signatures blossomed crimson across the ground as the new citizens of the city were revealed by the satellite’s scrutiny.

The square below them crawled. Blobs of heat scuttled over and around each other, haphazard and fearful. Lightning bolts clashed above the _Træleopard_ and washed the whole scene white for a second, revealing a scrum of twisted shapes and clumsy bodies desperately trying to flee from this goliath that had appeared in the skies above them.

Sigrun smiled and raised her hand to her earpiece. “Gunnery?” she asked.

“ _Yes, ma’am?”_ came the reply.

“Clear the ground.”

“ _Yes, ma’am.”  
_

_Let’s get this party started_ , she thought, as the _Træleopard_ opened fire.


	4. Chapter 4

_The Copenhagen sky is scorched by thunder.  
_

_There is nature’s thunder, the fury of the storm, the booming postscript to the lightning that arcs and leaps across the sky in brilliant skeins of white.  
_

_And there is humanity’s thunder, the cold fury of a species that has been pummelled and broken and yet is still standing, unleashed upon the hapless things that crawl below.  
_

_The Træleopard’s gondolas speckle and flicker with light as the airship’s armaments come online. Hatches slide open and barrels peer out of them like the appendages of nesting things. Targeting algorithms, seeing the world through high-powered optics buried in the hull, pick their victims with an almost loving care. This one, weak and feeble, will require little attention. That one, strong and armoured – a giant in the making, perhaps? – demands a more forceful solution. Chainguns and howitzers and high-energy plasma throwers swivel and tilt according to the demands of the ship’s AI and its human masters.  
_

_In gondola three, in a room marked ‘gunnery’, the last of a set of red lights glows green. And a small piece of Armageddon is let loose onto the city below.  
_

_The noise is unimaginable. Even the storm seems to pale beside it, seems to fade into the background as if almost impressed. The strange symphony of a Livjatan-class airship firing at full capacity is for a brutal few seconds the only noise in the Copenhagen sky. It is a mix of the deep bass chatter of rotary cannons and the tik-tak of their bullets striking home , the heavy thump and crash of mortar guns, and the weird warbling buzz of plasma charges as they sear their way through the air and leave fizzing clouds of ions in their wake.  
_

_Within moments the square below Træleopard runs slick with blood. Skulls pop, ribcages shatter, flesh is scorched off the bone, nameless organs are reduced to mulch. The square falls still as the things fleeing it are picked off one by one by the behemoth that has invaded their sky. A few stragglers, along with anything clever enough to play dead, are mopped up by broad sweeps of the guns.  
_

_In the command gondola a woman with hair the colour of the fire her airship has delivered permits herself a small smile as the holographic displays before her offer nothing but good news. She raises a hand to her ear and sends an order.  
_

_“Good luck, guys. Initiate drop.”  
_

_Electro-clamps power down, drill bits spin back, hydraulic linkers disengage. The Træleopard, suddenly freed from the mass below it, jolts upwards and its turbofans scream as they try to keep the ship level. Below it, Viking Inferno begins its descent, legs braced and booster jets roaring.  
_

_And below even that, something massive listens to the sounds and smells the reek of its brethren being massacred above, and feels something as close to fury as its alien mind can manage.  
_

_[You have wounded Us, you relics, you dregs of a dead world]  
_

_[You have killed countless ones. But can you stand against a Many?]  
_

_Legs move and scuttle. Armour plates shift to streamline their shape. A vast bulk moves towards its prey with dreadful purpose.  
_

 

* * *

 

Emil lived for this moment.

When in transit, Jaegers and their pilots were kept at a level of disconnection in order to prevent the movements of the pilots disrupting the aerodynamics of the zeppelin and its cargo. While in this dampened state, Emil could move and gesture but the Jaeger remained largely motionless. During the early days pilots had often been completely disconnected until the moment of the drop, but the NDC had quickly realised the folly of that rule once a couple of Jaegers had been forced to drop from their airships earlier than planned – only to fall into the Silent Zone like statues, shattering their legs and leaving them easy prey for the monsters they had been brought out to fight.

But now, with the drop proceeding as planned, he took full control once more.

In less than a second he was no longer Emil Västerström, a small and frightened young man about to fall feet-first into hell. Now, as sensory data from the Jaeger flooded his brain, he became Viking Inferno. His eyes saw into the infra-red, his skin could withstand tank rounds, his strength was unimaginable. He was as close to a god as a mere human could ever manage, and he intended to put his newfound power to good use.

There was a popping sensation along his spine – his drivesuit telling him the _Træleopard’s_ harness was disengaging. As the last connections between airship and Jaeger were severed Emil braced himself, and began to fall.

The sickening yaw in his stomach as he briefly experienced weightlessness was overridden by the adrenaline coursing through his blood. The ground rushed up to greet him and he could almost feel the wind whipping past him as Viking Inferno picked up speed. He scanned his HUD: all shock absorbers and crumple zones read green as the Jaeger’s leg primed themselves for the impact.

 _“Altitude: 500 metres and falling. Terrain warning. Brace. Brace. Brace.”_ Emil glanced up at the conn-pod’s speakers and grinned. It was an old bug in Viking’s AI that had never been patched out: the Jaeger’s AI, upon switching from idle to combat mode during the drop, would start to panic as it came to and found itself falling out of the sky. Apparently it was a bug across all of the Mark-7s, or so he’d been told. He had insisted they didn’t fix it, though – he found it oddly endearing.

_“Altitude: 400 metres… 300… 200… terrain warning… 100 metres… brace for impact…”  
_

The Jaeger hurtled out of the dark grey sky and hammered into the ground with a crash that echoed throughout the old city. Flagstones shattered and asphalt crumbled beneath the blow. Crumple zones on the Jaeger’s boots and shins crunched and burst in sprays of glittering metal shards and flecks of shock-absorbent foam. Aerogel vented out of ports on the knees and ankles, the massive compressive stresses bursting safety membranes and valves. Viking’s knees, one set then then other, bent to absorb the strain as its digitigrade legs folded up neatly underneath it. Bending at the hips, it slammed down one armoured fist to stabilise its landing while the other was flung out to one side for balance. The air was rent by the screech of metal and the roar of hydraulics.

“ _Altitude: zero metres. All systems… all systems… all systems nominal. Impact stresses within acceptable parameters. Structural diagnostics: no damage. Weapons: hot. Jaeger: Viking Inferno – combat ready._ ”

Was it just him or did the AI sound almost sheepish after its panic a few seconds ago? Emil liked to think that, as much as it was able to, it felt a little bit embarrassed. He smirked and flicked open a comms channel.

“ _Træleopard_? Viking here. Landing went a-okay. Starting search sweep.”

“ _Copy that, Viking,_ ” came Sigrun’s voice in his ear. “ _Happy hunting. We’ll start feeding you data from LOCCENT now. Can you get a direct uplink to Oresund?_ ”

Emil reached out and toggled a few switches. Dead static hissed from speakers and the words ‘no connection’ slowly bounced around empty screens. “Negative, _Træleopard_. Black noise is too thick out here, Viking’s comms gear isn’t good enough.”

“ _Understood. We’ll have to relay comms through the Træleopard. In the meantime we’re going to pull back, give you some room and get a better firing position. Out._ ”

Emil heard the roar of _Træleopard’s_ turbofans spinning up again as Sigrun signed off. He looked up and Viking Inferno looked with him, tilting its head up almost quizzically as the airship slowly started to gain altitude.

He straightened up, pulling the Jaeger out of the crouch it had landed in. Viking reared up to its full height and turned around as Emil tried to get his bearings. As the _Træleopard_ pulled away the rain began to sheet down onto the square again. Emil’s vision blurred and jumbled as it poured across Viking’s photochromic visor – only for the image in front of his eyes to freeze, blink, and pop back into existence perfectly clear. The Jaeger’s AI at work, rebuilding the image in real time to compensate for the rainwater. He looked out at the ruins of the city through banks of high-definition cameras – and nearly recoiled in panic at what he saw.

He had turned Viking Inferno to face the ruins of a church spire, still miraculously standing mere metres away despite the shockwave of the Jaeger’s landing. The conn-pod was on the same level as the spire’s shattered clock face, its one remaining hand reading half past the hour, and as Emil peered into the darkness behind the broken glass and wrought iron something peered back out at him with horribly human eyes. A troll, Emil saw as the Jaeger’s optics detected his intent and amplified the light, a troll the size of a bear, an amorphous mass of muscle connected to moss-like growths on the tower walls by draping tubes of flesh. His eyes went wide for a second as some primitive part of his brain urged him to get out of there, to turn and run for his life.

His panic lasted for half a second and then he remembered he was piloting a Jaeger.

He briefly considered torching the thing as the troll gibbered in terror and tried to back away from the metal titan glaring in at it. But why waste fuel? They’d probably need all they had once they found the giant. Almost lazily Emil brought his arm back and then pistoned it forwards. Viking copied his movements flawlessly, obliterating the spire with a single well-placed punch. The troll disappeared in a cloud of grey dust that was flecked here and there with gobbets of red. A buckled clock hand span away into the night and splinters of glass pattered down onto the cobblestones below.

Emil grinned savagely as he pulled his hand out of the wreckage. A few unidentifiable clumps of meat stuck to the Jaeger’s fist for a second before being washed off by the rain. He felt arrogant, unstoppable, and for a few precious seconds he let himself revel in it. His ribs and diaphragm tensed and he exhaled slowly, as if he was screaming without making a sound. The Jaeger screamed for him, a deep bass boom that reverberated in his chest and crashed around the jagged brickwork and splintered stone of Copenhagen. _Here I am_ , it seemed to say. _Come and get me._

If he had looked to his left, Emil would have seen Lalli hung limply in his drivesuit like a broken puppet. His co-pilot was being moved by the servomotor arms as much as he was moving them and what little motions he could make were feeble and half-hearted. A demented, psychotic grin split his face almost in two, the neural imprint of Emil’s destructive glee written across his face as he buckled under the neural load of keeping his friend in the drift. Lalli was in no small danger of having his entire personality subsumed by Emil’s at this rate, but he said nothing and sent no protestations through the drift. He knew what this brief feeling of invincibility meant to Emil, and he trusted him to come to his senses soon enough. And if he didn’t, well… Lalli trusted that he would. And that was that.

To his right, Emil began to move in the slow, plodding gait of a Jaeger and Lalli felt his legs and torso being manhandled to mimic him. As best as he was able to, Lalli continued his prayer. Ukko had seen fit to guide them through his storm unharmed, but Lalli knew that the squalls above them were not the worst storm they would have to face this night.

In front of him, a small light on his HUD pinged red, then another, then another.

“ _Alert: seismic sensors detect inbound signature._ ”

And here it came.

 

* * *

 

Mikkel sat behind the operations console of the _Træleopard_ and watched Hjorten bear down upon Viking Inferno.

The next few minutes, he knew, would be crucial. Whole battles between giants and Jaegers were often decided in the opening salvos. This would be the moment when they got their first good look at the giant, saw how thick its armour was and what kinds of weaponry the Rash had grafted onto it and grown out from the people it used to be. Likewise, it was the best time the Jaeger had to deal devastating damage to the giant before any nasty surprises the Rash had for them could be deployed.

He steepled his fingers in front of his face and watched the screens in front of him intently. All around him the chaos of the _Træleopard’s_ bridge continued – storm warnings, proximity warnings, damage reports, targeting solutions, weapons checks – but with the skill of a veteran of these things he blocked it out and focused on his own task. In the absence of a direct link from Viking to the Oresund Shatterdome, _Træleopard_ was forced to relay information from one to the other using her powerful comms gear. It was his job to make sure Viking Inferno got all the intel and tactical support it needed.

In front of him a map of Copenhagen was displayed on the main screen. In the top right corner a red ribbon of light was slicing its way across streets and housing blocks, seemingly without a care for whatever structures stood in its way. Its target, obvious even to a casual observer, was a small blue dot in the bottom left. Giant and Jaeger, less than a kilometre distant and minutes from a clash.

He zoomed in on the thermal signature of the giant, wending its way across the city like a crimson ribbon. Between them, the storm and the city had rendered almost all of their scanners useless. Night-vision equipment was almost blind in the driving rain, the Panopticon satellite was having great difficulty peering through the electrical interference of the storm, and the broken outline of the city confused and scattered the _Træleopard’s_ surface-scanning radar arrays. All they really had left to go on was Viking’s seismic sensors and the faint body heat that the giant gave off, visible even through the icy rainwater of an autumn storm.

Mikkel thought the heat signature of Hjorten, even accounting for the storm, was oddly faint, but he put his concerns aside. He would come to regret that later.

A screen on his right showed a wireframe rendering of Viking Inferno and one to his left showed a camera feed from the _Træleopard’s_ belly that focused in on the Jaeger below. He felt oddly like the machine’s guardian angel, looking down from on high and keeping an eye on things. _If this is heaven,_ he thought wryly as he glanced around the bridge, _I need to find a better religion._

“Viking, _Træleopard_ ,” he said into his comms headset. “Hjorten’s approaching you from the north-east, you should get a visual on it soon.” He looked back at the map, zooming in on the Jaeger this time. “Oh, and watch your footing. The big building across the street from you? That’s one of the old subway stations. Make sure you don’t fall in.”

“ _Copy that, Træleopard,_ ” came Emil’s voice.

The red streak of the giant surged onwards, ploughing through what was marked on his map as a small office complex. “It’s coming right at you, Viking, you should probably be able to see the dust that thing’s kicking up soon.”

“ _Uhh… nope, got nothing yet Mikkel. You sure it was coming from the north-east?_ ”

Mikkel frowned. Was the storm that bad, that the Jaeger couldn’t even see the destruction the giant was wreaking less than a kilometre away?

From across the command bridge, he heard Sigrun shout: “Okay everyone, final checks and action stations! I want us ready to give a broadside to this thing the _moment_ it sticks its head out! Mikkel, have we got eyes on it yet? Can you put the thing’s location up on the window HUD?”

His frown deepened. He could understand Viking not being able to see the giant but Sigrun should have had a bird’s eye view of the havoc it was wreaking. _How can no-one see it?_ he wondered, starting to feel the first twinges of bewilderment and anxiety. _Range: 300 metres and closing_ read the display in front of him. If it was that close Emil should be bracing the Jaeger, Sigrun should be shouting out for the gunnery to keep firing on the giant, but it seemed like he was the only one who could see the damn thing. The telemetry screen to his right showed the wireframe render of the Jaeger below turning round, looking in all directions.

“Viking, it’s right on top of you!” he called into his radio, raising his voice so Sigrun could hear him too. She span around and looked at him incredulously. “Moving in from the north-east still! 300 metres and getting closer, how can you not see it yet?”

“ _I don’t see anything!”_ came Emil’s voice back, fringed around the edges now with static. The telemetry screen began to pixelate and sprout connection warnings. _Black noise_ , he thought. _It’s here._

In a sudden flash of dreadful realisation, he understood what was happening.

“Viking, it’s using the subway system!” he bellowed, even as there was a sudden scream of panic in his ear, as the wireframe display showed Viking buckling and collapsing as if some tremendous weight had been flung at its back, as the screens showed a plume of dust and debris erupt out from the station to envelop the Jaeger below. He briefly heard Sigrun shout something in surprise, heard a new set of sirens start to call throughout the bridge, and then all he could hear was the dreadful boom of shattering stonework rising up from below.

And, mixed in with that cacophony, an inhuman screech.

 

* * *

 

Something slammed hard into the Jaeger’s back, staggering it and flinging Emil and Lalli forwards in their harnesses. A massive cloud of dirt obscured Emil’s view through the conn-pod visor and he reeled under the impact. His teeth rattled in his skull and he tasted blood as he bit his tongue.

He tried to right the Jaeger, to regain his balance, but whatever it was that had ambushed them was too fast. There was a searing pain in the back of his left leg and he felt his knee give way. He limped, listed to one side and then collapsed as Viking fell onto its hands and knees. His drivesuit applied a crushing pressure to his back and his skin crawled as he realised what that meant – _oh God its climbed on top of us_ – before something gripped the back of the conn-pod and slammed it down, again and again, into the hard asphalt beneath it.

Sirens wailed and pain cracked through Emil’s skull. He tried to remind himself that it was the Jaeger’s pain, not his own, but it was little comfort. If the conn-pod was breached… Desperately he threw an elbow behind himself and was rewarded with the satisfying _crunch_ of metal breaking bone. Outside the conn-pod something shrieked in pain and anger. Emil tried to push upwards, to dislodge the giant that was pressing them into the dirt, but there was another hammer blow to the conn-pod and he slumped forward, dazed and blinking stupidly.

In his punch-drunk stupor his attention wandered blindly. Something moved in the corner of his vision and he turned to look. It was a hand, a human hand, overgrown with cartilage and tendons into a grasping claw, scrabbling for a purchase on the smoother amber-platinum of the Jaeger’s visor. It looked hilariously like Hjorten was waving hello to the two pilots inside and Emil nearly broke out giggling.

There was a flash of blue light and the hand vanished in a puff of charred meat, leaving a bloody smear on the visor. Emil dimly recognised the signature precision-plasma bolts of the _Træleopard_. In any other situation he’d be incensed that they were firing so close to the Jaeger but now he was glad for all the help he could get. He could feel the giant shift its weight and pull away from his back as it moved to protect itself from the barrage of fire from the airship.

All of a sudden there was a searing pain down the entire length of his spine. Sparks danced behind his eyes and Emil screamed in agony. Status reports blinked red and warning scrawled across his HUD: _Mortar tube damage. Mortar tube unresponsive. Mortar tube disconnected._ He gritted his teeth. Weapons readouts confirmed what the damage reports were saying – the mortar tube that ran down the Jaeger’s spine had been torn clean off. The drivesuit relayed the damage to him the way it always did: pain. He gasped and blinked away tears.

The giant had taken its weight off of the Jaeger’s shoulders and he moved to take advantage of that. Viking’s hands clamped down onto the rain-wet asphalt and it pushed itself upright. Twisting his shoulders and turning his head, Emil swivelled the conn-pod just in time to see a monstrous mass of meat and gristle looming above him through the swirling cloud of debris that lingered from where the giant had burst out of the subway system. The thing still had the ruins of the mortar tube, raining sparks and scraps of metal, clamped in its jaws. As Emil watched in mounting horror, the thing span its head round in an upwards sweep and released the mortar tube, sending the piece of wreckage on a graceful arc up into the sky. The chunk of metal shot upwards with murderous speed – straight towards the _Træleopard_.

 

* * *

 

It took Sigrun a few precious moments to believe her eyes.

From out of the dust cloud, where she could just make out the blurred forms of the Jaeger and the giant, something cylindrical suddenly shot out towards her. Viking Inferno’s dorsal mortar tube, hurled with colossal force and frighteningly precise aim.

Her eyes went wide.

There was barely any time to react at all. “ _Evasive manoeuvres!”_ she bellowed. The helmsmen sat in front of her just stared in disbelief, their mouths hanging open in shock. Desperately she reached past them and slammed her hands down on _Træleopard’s_ turbofan controls, trying to do something, anything, to get them clear.

But even as the turbofans’ howl rose in pitch and the airship slowly started to slip to one side, she knew she was far too late.

 

* * *

 

Emil watched with sickening helplessness as the spinning piece of wreckage hurtled towards the _Træleopard_.

“ _No!_ ” he screamed, his mind filled with images of falling metal, of burning gasbags, of him and Lalli suddenly all alone in the Silent World.

And in the drift, his word was echoed.

_No.  
_

Where Emil’s word had been a scream of despair, Lalli’s was a statement of defiance.

For a brief second – the longest Lalli could manage under the neural load of Emil – they shared the Jaeger as pilots were supposed to. Lalli shouted something in Finnish too quickly for even the drift to translate and Viking Inferno’s hand shot out, palm outwards, as if to ward off a blow – or push something out of the way.

 

* * *

 

Sigrun was sent sprawling across the deck as something smashed into the _Træleopard_. The shriek of breaking metal filled the air. She hit her head on a bank of controls with a nasty _crack_ as she fell. Something tricked into her left eye and she realised distantly that it was probably blood.

Her vision blurred and her hearing started to fade. _Get a grip_ , she scolded herself as she grabbed the corner of the console and hauled herself back to her feet. Her hand came away sticky and red from where she’d hit her head. She looked around in a daze, fighting the rising urge to close her eyes and rest, just for a few seconds. _Get a grip_. She blinked and wiped her eye. _Fight’s not over yet, woman._

The bridge was a wreck. Anything unsecured – chairs, computer equipment, crewmembers – had been flung violently to the starboard side of the bride by the impact. The armourglass bow windows were cracked and one was shattered wide open, letting in a spray of rain. Ruined circuitry spat sparks and broken glass crunched under her boots as she staggered towards the _Træleopard’s_ helm controls. Sirens and screams crowded her ears. The few holographic displays that were still working shone damage reports into the air around her. The entire port side of the airship was covered in red warning signs: hull breach, gasbag tears, turbofans ripped off, weapons offline.

As she made her way towards them she saw that both of the helmsmen were sat slumped in their seats. One was ashen-faced and unconscious, bleeding heavily from a gash along the side of his neck where a splinter of armourglass had cartwheeled across the bridge. Sigrun didn’t rate his chances for survival. The other was still awake, grimacing in pain as he clutched his arm that was bent at an unnatural angle. He looked up at her as she leaned over his shoulder. “Air pocket,” he gasped. Sigrun had to bend down to hear him over the cacophony behind her. “We must have hit an air pocket. Nearly knocked us out of the sky, but I don’t think the mortar tube hit us.”

“Can we still fly?” Sigrun demanded.

“I… don’t…” the man whispered, and then his eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he went limp. Sigrun swore and checked his pulse. Still there, but very faint. She briefly considered calling for a medic, but she doubted anyone would hear her over the chaos. Plus, they’d all be busy anyway.

As best she could, she dragged the two helmsmen out of their seats and propped them up next to the flight controls. There was nothing she could do for either of them and the cold arithmetic of combat dictated that she had better things to worry about. She sat down in the pilot’s seat and cracked her knuckles. _Haven’t flown you in two years_ , she thought. _Let’s see if I’ve still got it._

She swivelled round in her chair and looked behind her, searching for anyone who she could rope into being her co-pilot. She spotted a young midshipman cowering in a corner a few metres away, his eyes wide and his hands twisting his long red braid this way and that in mindless terror. _Needs must_ , she thought grimly.

“You! Midshipman!” she roared over the noise. The young man looked up with a start and made a ‘ _who, me?’_ gesture. “ _Yes, you!_ Get over here now!”

The young man scrabbled to his feet and trotted over to her, picking his way past debris and wounded sailors. “Y-yes, ma’am?” he asked nervously. Sigrun faintly recognised him from other deployments, although they had never spoken. “Congratulations, Mr…” she paused to read the name badge on his uniform, “… Mr Árnason. You have officially just been promoted to co-pilot of the _KDM Træleopard_ , a rise through the ranks unheard of in NDC history! Now sit down and help me fly this thing, we’re not done here yet.”

He made some weak protestations but she grabbed him by the arm and shoved him into the chair. “It’s simple!” she shouted. She pointed to the various controls, focussing on the banks of throttle levers that controlled what were left of the _Træleopard’s_ turbofans. “Up, down, port, starboard… and ‘start’,” she added, pointing with a grin at the button that gave the bridge commanders control over the _Træleopard’s_ gunnery.

“OK, bring her around,” she commanded, manhandling the throttle levers. Reynir fiddled with the controls and prayed to a set of gods Sigrun didn’t recognise. The gun batteries on the port side of the airship had been destroyed by a glancing blow from the mortar tube but the starboard ones had been mostly spared, although the turbulence that had knocked them clear had also put a few of the larger guns out of action. “We need to give the starboard side a clear firing line!” Sigrun shouted to her new co-pilot as the airship lurched sickeningly through the storm.

At the other end of the bridge, as he desperately tried to stop a crewmember bleeding out, Mikkel felt the airship’s juddering movement in the pit of his stomach. _Either we just lost a gasbag or…_ He wasn’t sure which would be worse – the airship crashing from the sky, or being piloted by Captain Eide. Bad memories of the last time Sigrun had flown them, slaloming around pillars of fire one dark night over Trondheim as the Citadel’s fuel depots ignited across the night, bubbled up in his mind. He cursed quietly and pressed a fresh compress into the wound beneath his hands. He dimly heard yet another cry for a medic ring across the bridge.

 _We don’t need a doctor_ , he thought grimly, _we need divine intervention._

 

* * *

 

 _I don’t know what you just did_ , Emil sent through the drift as the _Træleopard_ swerved through the sky, battered but still flying, _but I’m sure glad you did it._

 _No problem…_ came the reply, pitifully weak, as Lalli gave Emil command of the Jaeger once more. He sagged back into his harness as if exhausted. Emil realised that he probably was, and not for the first time felt a little twinge of guilt for putting his friend in this position every single time they piloted.

He turned his attention back to the giant. Hjorten had released the Jaeger from its grasp and backed away, trying to find cover from the relentless barrage of fire from the airship above. Above him the _Træleopard_ executed a lazy turn through the air above the Jaeger, spinning around so that its starboard side now faced the giant that was hunkering down on the other side of the plaza from them. As the zeppelin moved, its turbofans – the few that remained operational – washed great gusts of air across the square and blew away the last of the debris and dust. The air cleared, and Emil got his first good look at the giant as it was illuminated by lightning and the _Træleopard_ ’s spotlights.

Every giant was different. That was one of the first things they taught you when you became a Ranger – never expect the next fight to go like the last, because it won’t. The Rash was creative in ways that would turn your stomach if you weren’t too busy fighting for your life. In his short three years in the conn-pod of Viking Inferno Emil had seen giants that spat acidic bile, giants that shot armoured spines, giants that were little more than mouths and teeth and that had tried to swallow his Jaeger whole. Just about the only thing he hadn’t seen a giant do yet was fly, and even then he was convinced it must only be a matter of time. Now, as Hjorten was revealed to him, he did his best to analyse the thing, to try and deduce what nasty surprise it might spring on him.

It looked rather like a colossal millipede. Its long tubular body was split up into about ten distinct segments, each of which was covered with interlocking armour plates that were chipped and scorched after the _Træleopard’s_ barrage. A few larger holes leaked a sticky dark liquid and a few tatters of flesh. Each segment bristled with grasping arms and spindly legs and scythe-like claws. Its front was a mad jumble of mandibles and mouthparts, twitching and slavering and dripping thick yellow ichor. Emil took care not to focus too hard on the exposed flesh of the monster – etched into the repurposed flesh was the occasional reminder of what that this creature had once been.

Above him the _Træleopard_ let loose another burst of fire and Emil clambered to his feet. The giant bellowed in fury and pain as anti-armour rounds and plasma bolts drilled through it. Viking Inferno replied in kind, letting out another deep roar. Inside the conn-pod Emil steeled himself, dropping into a fighting stance with his legs braced and his arms raised. _This is it_ , he thought, trying to keep his breathing under control. _Here we go.  
_

And then the giant did something utterly unexpected.

 

* * *

 

Buried in the static, Lalli heard the mocking hiss of the monster before him.

_[Detach, detach, remove yet remain, become separate yet stay One]  
_

_[We shall swarm]  
_

_[And you shall fall]_

 

* * *

 

At the junctions of Hjorten’s body, where the armoured segments were connected to one another by thick trunks of muscle and sinew, long bladed arms unfurled like the claws of a mantis. Hjorten brandished these in the air for a second and then plunged them straight down – into its own flesh.

With neat flicks of the wicked-looking blades it seemed to almost disembowel itself, slicing its body apart. One by one the armoured sections that made up its body fell away from one another. There was almost no blood, no spray of gore fountaining up from the tears Hjorten carved into itself. It was as if the giant had been designed to be able to carve itself up – and that, Emil realised as he looked on in disbelief, was probably exactly right. This was _deliberate_ , this had been _planned_. Not for the first time some small part of him marvelled at the gruesome ingenuity of the Rash. It was like watching a train decouple its carriages.

In the space of a few seconds the giant went from one huge monster to several smaller ones. Following their own individual designs, but working in alarming unison, they fanned out across the plaza towards him. Rainwater sheeted down off their hides and flew in great sprays from their feet as they charged. The ones moving straight for him followed a strange back-and-forth pattern as they closed in and Emil realised that they were probably working to keep the Jaeger in between them and the punishing fire from the zeppelin above. He noticed that the _Træleopard’s_ guns had mostly fallen silent, although whether they had run out of ammo or the gunners simply refused to believe what they were seeing he didn’t know. If it was the latter, he hardly blamed them.

He tried to shut up the tiny voice in his head that was telling him that no Jaeger had ever been designed to fight an enemy like this one, let alone any pilot trained to fight it. He extended traction pitons in the boots of Viking Inferno to help keep his grip on the slick paving stones beneath his feet, and charged.

 

* * *

 

_“LOCCENT, this is Træleopard, come in LOCCENT!”  
_

_“LOCCENT to Træleopard, we copy. Sigrun, what’s going on out there? I’ve lost telemetry from Viking and the data I’m getting says your ship’s taken massive structural damage! What’s happened?”  
_

_“Tuuri, listen to me, you need to get everything we’ve got out here right now! This giant… I’ve never seen anything like it before. Viking can’t fight it on its own and our guns are dry. We need assistance, now!”  
_

_A dreadful pause on the comms, as one side desperately hopes for some good news and the other desperately searches for some to give.  
_

_“Ah… Træleopard, there’s nothing else we can deploy at short notice. There’s an Icelandic destroyer out in the straits but she’s not built for fire support. She’ll likely as not hit you guys instead of the giant. I can try-”  
_

_The line clicks dead, overwhelmed by a sudden burst of static. Sigrun turns to the panicking kid sat next to her and utters the six worst words in the world.  
_

_“I think we’re on our own.”_

 

* * *

 

Viking Inferno torched the first one of Hjorten’s segments as it came scuttling across the plaza towards it, unleashing the full white-hot fury of its twin wrist-mounted flamethrowers onto the building-sized hunk of bone and meat before it. At the same time the left UV-halogen lamp mounted on the Jaeger’s skull finally burst into life, scouring the infected flesh clean. The segment howled and shrieked and shrivelled, twisting and charring underneath the onslaught. The Jaeger, charging forward with unstoppable momentum, crashed into the fragment as it died, smashing it aside with a powerful blow that sent it tumbling across the plaza. The fragment gave a gurgling moan and fell still.

 _One down_ , Emil thought with manic glee.

He dug in Viking’s heels and pulled the Jaeger to a halt just short of a row of brick terraces that he would have toppled through if he hadn’t stopped. Viking turned around just in time to catch another segment as it lunged upwards at the conn-pod. Emil was suddenly confronted with a mass of mandibles and jaws and the Jaeger’s optics made it look like they were mere centimetres away from his face. He yelped in shock and blindly slammed his fist forward. The Jaeger’s knuckles met the fragment’s mouthparts dead-on and crushed them with the full force of the machine’s enormous hydraulic arrays. Viking’s fist disappeared into the thick red slop that it had reduced the creature’s maw to and Emil activated the flamer on its wrist. The fragment writhed and howled as it was cooked from the inside. Flames leapt from gaps in its armour and it collapsed, smoking.

_Two down._

He was just yanking the Jaeger’s fist from the crackling corpse when something blindsided him from his right, knocking into him and sending him sprawling. The Jaeger staggered and something else crashed into it from behind. Emil heard the snarling squeal of the hull-mounted bandsaws chewing up bone, followed by a grinding mechanical choke as they became clogged. _Point defence saws: offline_ , chirruped his HUD. He hissed in frustration and tried to claw whatever was latched onto his back loose but something else suddenly knocked his knees out from under him and he toppled forwards once more.

The Jaeger collapsed with a groan of damaged steel. It splashed down into a small lake that had formed in the middle of the plaza as the rainwater circulated throughout the ruined city, sending up a shower of spray. The conn-pod was the last part to impact and Emil got a brief glimpse of malformed shapes marshalling beyond the spray before his view was obscured by water too thick even for the Jaeger AI’s advanced image-processing abilities to see through. He could barely hear the sound of his own Jaeger falling over the din of sirens in his ears.

He was outmatched. He knew it, but he refused to believe it.

He tried to pick himself up once again but Hjorten was one step ahead. A massive weight smacked the conn-pod and with a screech of breaking metal a large gash appeared down the entire right-hand side. Jagged bone clawed though the hole mere metres away from where Emil stood. Rainwater and the sounds of the storm outside spat though the gap, washing across his drivesuit helmet, blinding him and rendering him deaf. All of a sudden his interface harness felt less like a control mechanism and more like a trap, holding him in place for the giant to take at its leisure.

His right side abruptly jolted, sagged, and then a new warning blinked on his HUD: _pilot right side disconnection_. Emil twisted his head and looked behind him in horror. The giant had torn his drivesuit’s interface arms out of their sockets and they now hung limply behind him, dragging across the conn-pod floor. The bony claw jerked out of the wound it had made and a trio of clutching hands took its place, blindly groping around.

One of them found the loose interface arms, and began to pull.

Emil’s eyes went wide and he screamed in terror. He could feel the terrible strength of the giant tugging against the few connections that still held him in his harness, popping them loose one by one. Blind, animal panic seized him, the panic of the prey confronted by the predator, and he thrashed around madly as he was slowly and inexorably drawn towards the opening.

Without warning, the Jaeger stood up.

It hauled itself upright in one fluid motion, rolling its shoulders to dislodge the things that were squatting on top of it. Emil heard the thud-splatter of them plummeting to earth and hitting the ground below. The hands that were pulling him fell away and he got a glimpse of something vast falling past the wound in the conn-pod with a thick cry.

Emil grabbed the central control console and began to haul himself back to safety. His drivesuit was covered with water and he slipped and scrabbled on the conn-pod floor. Finally getting a decent grip, he hung on for dear life and looked up at Lalli, who was staring ahead with grim determination.

 _Brace yourself_ , came Lalli’s thoughts through the drift.

Lalli raised his arm high above his head, as if punching the air in celebration, and the Jaeger copied him. Emil stared at him in confusion, and it took him a few seconds to realise that Lalli was no longer muttering under his breath. His prayer, or whatever it was, was over.

 _Did I ever tell you,_ Lalli grinned in savage triumph, _the old Finnish folk tale of Hannu and the vipers?  
_

Up above the Jaeger, above its upraised fist that rose above even the tallest spires of the old city, the storm clouds boiled.

 

* * *

 

_[What are you doing?]  
_

_[You think a prayer will save you?]  
_

_[We think not.]  
_

_[Who are you even… oh no]  
_

_[no no nononoNO]  
_

_[Detach! Disengage! Withdraw! Retrea-]_

* * *

 

From above the Jaeger, from the ink-black clouds, a single bolt of lightning scorched its way earthwards.

It jinked past the _Træleopard_ , frying circuitry all the same and finally silencing the cacophony of alarms as it overloaded the bridge’s speaker system. The whole bridge was washed white by its glare. Sigrun threw up an arm to shield her face and dove down behind the controls, dragging Reynir with her, as tendrils of electricity played over the airship’s metal superstructure.

It carried on, arcing down and landing almost gracefully on Viking Inferno’s upraised fist.

Jagged branches of electricity ran across the Jaeger’s metal skin, fizzing across armour plates and dancing around rivets. Inside the conn-pod, Emil screamed once more as the voltage found a way up through the loose drivesuit arms that were hanging out into the storm and into him. He collapsed to the floor, twitching and choking, as the power burned through him.

And from outside the conn-pod, his screams were mimicked.

The lighting carried on, not caring for what stood in its way. It jumped down the legs of the machine and slammed into the water it stood ankle-deep in, flash-boiling it in a thundering detonation that reverberated across the city. It powered through flesh and meat, blistering and bursting it as it swept onwards in a blinding flash. The fragments of Hjorten had the very life burned out of them as they shuddered and smouldered. One, the one that had been the monster’s mouthparts when it had been whole, emitted a last pitiful whimper before it too went silent.

The lightning earthed itself through the concrete and asphalt of the old city, and all was still once more.

 

* * *

 

Emil barely felt the jolt as Viking sat down, barely heard the pitch-shifting whine as its engines powered down. His entire body was agony and his vision was fading. Feebly, he reached up and tried to disconnect his drivesuit helmet – his oxygen supply was shot, he felt like he was drowning – but he couldn’t manage it.

A pair of hands gripped him by his shoulders and propped him up. Lalli, silhouetted against the ragged hole torn in the conn-pod’s hull, haloed by the blinding light of the _Træleopard’s_ searchlights.

Emil could dimly see the panic on his co-pilot’s face. Through the last fragments of the drift between them, maintained even as the Jaeger’s AI crashed and collapsed, he felt his friend’s anguish.

“It’s fine,” he tried to say, but all that came out was an incoherent whisper. As Lalli moved his head, trying to find the emergency disconnect for his helmet, he saw his own reflection in Lalli’s faceplate and his heart sank.

 _I’m going to die with cat ears on my head_ , he thought dismally, remembering the accursed things that had been glued to his helmet in jest just a few short hours ago. It felt like months.

He saw Lalli shake him by his shoulders but felt nothing. The last thing he saw was the running lights of the _Træleopard_ as it swept down to meet them.

The last thing he heard was someone calling his name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that went on for longer than I thought it was going to. Weirdly, I actually hate writing fights because they tend to devolve into 'x did y and then z' over and over again. But I think this one turned out okay-ish.


	5. Chapter 5

_Shutdown procedures.  
_

_Lalli doesn’t know the shutdown procedures! If I don’t turn off the plasma reactor the entire Jaeger’s going to blow sky-  
_

Emil opened his eyes.

The Jaeger was gone.

He blinked and looked around.

_Oh.  
_

A soft pillow beneath his head, smooth sheets on his skin. The Oresund Shatterdome’s sickbay started to swim into focus before his eyes.

_How long…?  
_

He looked to his left. A small holographic clock sat on a nightstand next to the bed he was propped up in. The date showed a number much larger than it had been the last time he had seen it. _I’ve been out for over a week!_

Experimentally, he tried to move his arms and legs. That was another thing they taught Rangers in the academy – make sure you’ve got a working set of limbs first, and plan accordingly. His arms responded sluggishly, although he was alarmed to note that the right one was swathed in bandages, but his legs seemed paralysed. Emil frowned. It was an odd sort of paralysis, he thought – he could feel his toes but not move his legs, as if a heavy weight were pressed down on them.

His vision finally cleared and he peered down the bed.

_Oh, you’ve got to be kidding…  
_

There, slumped over his knees in a manner that could be charitably described as ungraceful, was Lalli, snoring softly. His hair was thick and tangled with grease and there were huge bags under his closed eyes. He looked like a wreck.

“Hey! Psst! Lalli!” Emil hissed. “Wake up! Come on, my legs are going to sleep!”

Lalli stirred, murmured something unintelligible, and carried on snoring.

Emil sat back and folded his arms. It suddenly occurred to him that Lalli might well have been waiting by his bedside for a very long time. He smiled quietly, and decided to let him sleep.

In his head he totted up the damage from what he could remember as he reached across and plucked a grape from a bunch someone had left on his nightstand. _Viking’s busted, I’m walking wounded and Lalli looks like he could sleep though the apocalypse._ He grinned.

_All in all, a successful mission._

 

* * *

 

Email to: Trond.Andersen@nordicdefencecorps.staff.se

Subject: RE: Ranger Västerström

 

General,

I am pleased to report that Ranger Västerström has at last regained consciousness and appears to be well on the road to a full recovery. At the moment he is still recuperating from minor electrical burns and a few cracked ribs, but I expect him to be fully mobile within 4-5 weeks. I am recommending a course of physiotherapy which should work to combat any muscular atrophy in this time.

You will also be happy to hear that this means we can finally coax Ranger Hotakainen away from his bedside vigil, which he has kept steadfastly for the past ten days since we brought Ranger Västerström in. Major Hollola has already made one attempt to dislodge him a week ago, although I doubt she will be willing to try that again after what happened. Ranger Hotakainen himself shows no signs of injury aside from tremendous sleep deprivation and elevated anxiety levels. I have prescribed a dose of sedatives, which he has refused to take. Nevertheless I feel this will be a matter that can be swiftly resolved now Ranger Västerström is finally awake.

In my medical opinion, both are in desperate need of what we doctors refer to as ‘a shower’.

Dr Mikkel Madsen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! The Pacific Rim crossover is finally finished. Thanks to Haiz for suggesting it in the first place and helping me through writing it, and thanks to everyone who read it and who left kudos/comments. It's been quite an experience writing something of this length and I'm not sure I could have managed it on my own.  
> Now I wonder what happened in Trondheim...


End file.
